FarFarAway
New member
I was going to do a full review and perhaps I shall in the future..perhaps 
Pics are mostly FragTek's but I'll add some of my own as/when
Box Front
Box Back
Box Contents
Motherboard Left
Motherboard Bottom
Motherboard Right
Motherboard Top
As you can see the board is very well laid out. One major thing I've found is that the PWM heatsink gets in the way of my Apogee mount which meant initially my temps were appalling. I replaced this with some Swiftech VGA sinks and all was well.
The sideways SATA ports are great and everything is on the edge of the board like it should be.
Full Screen Boot Logo
BIOS
First boot into BIOS is very scary. Now I'm not a newbie when it comes to motherboards and loved the awesome tweakability of the 939 SLI-D, but this things BIOS is just scary.
I dare anyone to look through it and not be overwhelmed at first.
Luckily there are good guides out there now or I'd have been umm screwed
If you're a tweaker then you'll be happier than a pig in muck. Volt tweaking is HUGE and there is a LOT of voltages to adjust, all with a good range and all that help in some way.
Timings are great too with a huge range unlocked by Oskar. The main ones are the ones that make the most difference, but hey tweak some of the others to get more stability
FSB options are also great...basically all you need to OC C2D
Build Quality
Now I've never found this but a lot of people find DFI build quality to be a little lacking. Looking at the ICFX3200 it looks very solid. Everything is high-quality, from the Digital PWM to the quality Jap capacitors.
One major niggle:
Thermal Paste Horribleness:
That was the paste applied as standard! VERY bad. I replaced this with Arctic Ceramique and temps were better, but not a huge amount.
The NorthBridge is severely lacking a fan. With no fan on it it shoots up to 85°C+ when overclocking and putting some decent voltages in it. With a fan it stays around 55-62°C.
Fair play to DFI for not putting on heatpipes strewn over the board: personally I'm not a big fan of the "all in one solution" at all. However I feel that they have put on a cooler that isn't up to the job.
I am planning on getting the Thermalright Intel NB heatsink for it and running that with a fan.
Overclocks
On my terrible stepping E6600 B0 Retail (need hella volts to get anywhere):
Both below are 100% Orthos/Bench/Gaming Stable:
As you can see running the RAM asynch is very effective. You can pretty much use any RAM and set it to what you want and it just works...period. That's better than any other board I've used with Core2Duo.
This is actuially running at 1.55v @ 3373, which is 0.025 less than on every other board I've tested this chip on (and is Orthos stable)
I don't have screenies of other higher frequency RAM but it certainly does benefit Sandra Scores to run the RAM at higher bandwidth.
I managed to get my 6400 @ DDR1004 no problems and it's now stable.
Beware though if you're doing this you'll have to tweak your RAM a bit.
ALWAYS remember to enable "Software reset clockgen" under performance options or the board won't post until you do a proper CMOS reset (power off, battery out etc)
Like I said this is a brief overview asd lot's of people have asked me about it.
For more info on some of the options check this guide
Conclusion
Pro's
+ Great Tweaking Options
+ Lower volts for overclock
+ Great looking
+ General good build quality
+ Recovers very well from bad overclock
+ Stable @ stock and overclocked
+ Great memory asynch options
Con's
- Bad Thermal Paste Application
- Insufficient chipset cooling
- Will be confusing if you are new to BIOS
Personally I love this board now after an initial period of being scared of it
It's a great board and if DFI/yourself sort out the chipset cooler then it is undoubtedly one of the best/if not the best out there.
Would I buy it again: yes I certainly would
Pics are mostly FragTek's but I'll add some of my own as/when
Box Front
Box Back
Box Contents
Motherboard Left
Motherboard Bottom
Motherboard Right
Motherboard Top
As you can see the board is very well laid out. One major thing I've found is that the PWM heatsink gets in the way of my Apogee mount which meant initially my temps were appalling. I replaced this with some Swiftech VGA sinks and all was well.
The sideways SATA ports are great and everything is on the edge of the board like it should be.
Full Screen Boot Logo
BIOS
First boot into BIOS is very scary. Now I'm not a newbie when it comes to motherboards and loved the awesome tweakability of the 939 SLI-D, but this things BIOS is just scary.
I dare anyone to look through it and not be overwhelmed at first.
Luckily there are good guides out there now or I'd have been umm screwed
If you're a tweaker then you'll be happier than a pig in muck. Volt tweaking is HUGE and there is a LOT of voltages to adjust, all with a good range and all that help in some way.
Timings are great too with a huge range unlocked by Oskar. The main ones are the ones that make the most difference, but hey tweak some of the others to get more stability
FSB options are also great...basically all you need to OC C2D
Build Quality
Now I've never found this but a lot of people find DFI build quality to be a little lacking. Looking at the ICFX3200 it looks very solid. Everything is high-quality, from the Digital PWM to the quality Jap capacitors.
One major niggle:
Thermal Paste Horribleness:
That was the paste applied as standard! VERY bad. I replaced this with Arctic Ceramique and temps were better, but not a huge amount.
The NorthBridge is severely lacking a fan. With no fan on it it shoots up to 85°C+ when overclocking and putting some decent voltages in it. With a fan it stays around 55-62°C.
Fair play to DFI for not putting on heatpipes strewn over the board: personally I'm not a big fan of the "all in one solution" at all. However I feel that they have put on a cooler that isn't up to the job.
I am planning on getting the Thermalright Intel NB heatsink for it and running that with a fan.
Overclocks
On my terrible stepping E6600 B0 Retail (need hella volts to get anywhere):
Both below are 100% Orthos/Bench/Gaming Stable:
As you can see running the RAM asynch is very effective. You can pretty much use any RAM and set it to what you want and it just works...period. That's better than any other board I've used with Core2Duo.
This is actuially running at 1.55v @ 3373, which is 0.025 less than on every other board I've tested this chip on (and is Orthos stable)
I don't have screenies of other higher frequency RAM but it certainly does benefit Sandra Scores to run the RAM at higher bandwidth.
I managed to get my 6400 @ DDR1004 no problems and it's now stable.
Beware though if you're doing this you'll have to tweak your RAM a bit.
ALWAYS remember to enable "Software reset clockgen" under performance options or the board won't post until you do a proper CMOS reset (power off, battery out etc)
Like I said this is a brief overview asd lot's of people have asked me about it.
For more info on some of the options check this guide
Conclusion
Pro's
+ Great Tweaking Options
+ Lower volts for overclock
+ Great looking
+ General good build quality
+ Recovers very well from bad overclock
+ Stable @ stock and overclocked
+ Great memory asynch options
Con's
- Bad Thermal Paste Application
- Insufficient chipset cooling
- Will be confusing if you are new to BIOS
Personally I love this board now after an initial period of being scared of it
It's a great board and if DFI/yourself sort out the chipset cooler then it is undoubtedly one of the best/if not the best out there.
Would I buy it again: yes I certainly would
